Take 1,000 IT people involved in online businesses from around the world – from developers to venture capitalists – and you’re bound to get reality checks on a range of fronts. Le Web 3 brings these people together in formal conference sessions, informalk networking and a fascinating, compelling and intimidating start-up room. I’m here learning for the Find It online classifieds business being rolled out in partnership with newsagents. But there are more take aways than those which relate to Find It. Here is a summary of my key take-aways today.
First up, every second attendee is sitting in the conference hall laptop open and reading and writing during the sessions. More male than female. I’d guess the average age at early 30s.
Newsagents are getting left behind. I know I go on here like a cracked record about this but you onle have to come to a conference like Le Web and see how disconnected we are with the new worl in our bricks and mortar businesses. We must get this to survive.
They are generating content as they go – participating in live and relevant polls which speakers comment on from the stage.
Newsagents have no conection with the world of user generated content.
We’re hearing that user generated content is key. Quality content. A chap from yahoo said driving quality content was the holy grail. But then he said that while there;’s crap at YouTube, that there is some quality makes the site compelling.
The newspapers and magazines we sell in newsagencies deliver, in the main, quality content. There’s some, short term, comfort in that.
There was talk of a big impact of Web 2.0 on middlemen and in particular TV networks. IPTV is about connecting content producers with consumers. The TV stations are the losers in this. Consumers are proving they want content where and when they want. TB networks work against this. In an IPTV world the TV program is replaced by an a la carte menu.
Newsagents are middlemen for the most part. We make money from selling product people can get individually elsewhere. We need our own reasons to exist.
Free is the game in town. Free broadband. Free online software. Free content. Monetisation comes from advertising and other less obvious revenue models.
If you look at the change in newspaper cover prices in Australia over the last ten years compared to the change in advertising rates over the same period and you can see that publishers agree. In real terms, Australian newspapers sold in newsagencies are closer to being free today than ten years ago. Niche titles – foreign language newspapers – price their product as if the content is valuable.
More than this has been covered so far but I’m not about to blog about take-aways which will benefit Find It and my other businesses.
So far Le Web 3 has been exciting, challenging and very enjoyable.